Thursday, March 26, 2009

Measure B: Tweets Against The Machine

There’s one thing both sides agree on following the defeat of Solar Measure B: It was a message to those in power to watch out. A handful of activists armed with one-twentieth of the budget of their foes, savvy use of the Internet and repetition of a clear message were enough to overcome a slick campaign, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and 12 of the 15 members of the City Council.

Last week, the City Clerk certified the death of Measure B, which would have draped L.A. buildings with 1,500 acres of solar panels at a cost of billions. It would have been the single largest solar plan in the country, and in a city with more sunlight than it knows what to do with, it was widely expected to be a slam-dunk.

Yet the key underlying motives that propelled the solar measure forward, arrived at in backroom discussions by a handful of power brokers, turned out to be the proposal’s fatal flaws.

The measure’s sponsor was the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and its chief, the often overblown Brian D’Arcy. His union controls much of what unfolds at DWP, where critics say a weak management team, led by neophyte director David Nahai, is making long-lasting strategic errors by letting D’Arcy bully his way into a shadow role as the actual executive at DWP.

Measure B would have given the IBEW a near-complete monopoly over all the work on the multibillion-dollar project. D’Arcy’s assumption was that the voters of Los Angeles wanted solar power so badly they wouldn’t mind the open-ended costs or the underlying dual ballot-measure motives: to dramatically increase the reach of IBEW while using the city ballot as a self-promotion tool for Antonio Villaraigosa.

Does this mean the end of solar for LA? Hardly. First of all, Measure B was only one part of a massive three-part plan involving residential and commercial components (read about it here). Secondly, there's nothing to stop Measure B's proponents from bringing a workable proposal to the City Council for public review:

One day after the solar energy plan known as Measure B went down to defeat, backers of the proposal said they would push the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to pursue the environmental initiative anyway.

Environmentalists, labor leaders and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said they would continue to press the municipal utility to achieve Measure B's core mission: the installation of 400 megawatts of DWP-owned solar panels throughout the city, and on city-owned property, by 2014.

Brian D'Arcy, who heads the union that represents DWP workers, said the ballot measure remains a good plan even though Los Angeles residents "voted the wrong way."

"It's the kind of thing our president was talking about. It puts people back to work where they live," said D'Arcy, business manager for International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 18. "I am not discouraged because it's the right thing to do, and I'm going to keep pressing them to do it."

But it's going to be up to us to move this process along. Don't think we have the power to do that? Think again.

The Los Angeles Ethics Commission official revealed, as required by law, that Yes on B spent nearly $1.6 million only to fail against the tiny $74,451 mustered by No on Measure B, which it used mostly to send out mail.....

Its defeat was a shock to former Obama California campaign manager Mitchell Schwartz, who became part of the melodrama in January when he filed an unsuccessful court petition to water down the “con” language opposing Measure B in the Official Voter Guide. Schwartz’s attempt to prevent voters from seeing the “con” argument as written by Jack Humphreville and other Los Angeles activists turned into yet another black eye for Measure B.

Schwartz put up $1,000 of his own money to help Measure B. He now says, “When something that should be very popular doesn’t pass, it is a wakeup call to the mayor and the City Hall establishment. There was something that went on that the mayor and others need to look at and understand. There is some discontent out there which is directed at the powerful.”

On January 3, DWP officials presented Measure B to a meeting of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Coalition. Michael Trujillo, a consultant who ran the Yes on B campaign, disingenuously warned the crowd that without voter approval, “the DWP won’t do it” — when in fact, bloggers had already reported that DWP has a backup plan to embrace most of Measure B with or without voter approval.

“After the meeting, we started grappling with the idea that we had been dealt the hand of being a ‘No’ group,” says Stephen Box, a bicycle activist who wound up running the on-the-fly communications effort against Measure B.

Using sites like Twitter and Facebook, Box started organizing. By February, No on Measure B was trading punches with the mayor, City Council, IBEW and DWP, tapping into neighborhood councils and other groups to hold 80 town hall meetings and debates in February alone.

The blogging and social networking created a buzz, while the Los Angeles Daily News and L.A. Times both published editorials against the measure. A blog on the New York Times Website reported “dueling Facebook groups” fighting over Measure B. The City Council’s small group of just three fiscal conservatives, Bernard Parks, Dennis Zine and Greig Smith, broke ranks to slam the measure. City Controller Laura Chick, seen by some as the most popular politician in Los Angeles, warned that Measure B “stinks.”

This set the stage for a brilliantly sunny Election Day on March 3, when just under 18 percent of eligible voters showed up, and turned down Measure B by a margin of 2,644 votes.

“The public actually shut down a multimillion-dollar campaign” led by Villaraigosa, Box says. “They got a taste of real political will.”

Can rag-tag Facebookers and neighborhood council activists blog and tweet their way to a solar future and a real stake at the political table?

Mayoral spokesman Matt Szabo says Measure B’s opponents “will play an important role as citizen journalists in holding policymakers accountable as we move forward with our solar plan.” Garcetti’s office sounds less vague. “Eric did talk to Ron Kaye and Jack Humphreville and he does want to work with them,” says Garcetti spokeswoman Julie Wong.

But Brian D’Arcy, in a back-patting statement in which he insisted he was all about transparency, is already urging DWP and Villaraigosa to “swiftly implement a solar energy plan” that many experts say is not ready for prime-time.

Measure B’s opposition is wary about rushing a Measure B lookalike through City Hall. “The council members pay some lip service about transparency,” Kaye says. “But we haven’t heard [a plan for activing transparent] out of the mayor’s mouth or David Nahai’s mouth, and D’Arcy says, ‘Fuck you people, we will do whatever we want.’ ”